[mdlug] Something to watch out for - motherboard RAID chips

[Ingles, Raymond]

I was recommissioning a computer for my kids. It once had two identical 120GB drives in a RAID setup, but I'd disabled that a while back. (Wanted more space, and no critical data was stored there.) The motherboard had some software-RAID support, but I hadn't used it in Windows, and when I originally installed Linux, it didn't support that chip.

On Sunday, I'd gotten a fresh XP install on the machine, but preserved some of the games and stuff. Then I went to install Xubuntu 11.10 AMD64 on the machine, and set up the install to remove some Linux partitions, create some new ones, and leave some free space. I only worked with the primary disk, and didn't bother looking at the other one.

This turned out to be a mistake. Apparently the Xubuntu installer thought to itself, "two identical drives, and hey - here's a RAID chipset! This must be a RAID system!" So it seems to have assumed a RAID-1 setup, and updated the partition table on the second drive. I haven't had time to discover if it actually overwrote data on the second disk, but since I didn't back up the old partition table (silly me), the data is lost anyway.

Like I said, there's nothing irretrievably lost, but I was almost done and now I have to repeat some work. I've gone into the BIOS and disabled the RAID chip, so hopefully *that* won't be an issue anymore...

---
Raymond Ingles, Software Developer, Compuware APM Business Unit      T +1 (313) 227-2317  raymond.ingles at compuware.com

Follow us on Twitter: @GomezAPM  |  Like us on Facebook  |  Watch our videos on YouTube  |  Join us on LinkedIn